Oh My God, Y'all, I Wrote a Novel

Thanks to the prodding of a friend of mine, I decided to try my hand at writing fiction this month for the first time in - oh, years. For those of you not in the know, November is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org if you're interested). The goal is to write a "lengthy work of fiction" totalling at least 50,000 words in a month.

I did it! 50,000 words is a rather short novel, and mine came in around 58 - 59k (depending on whose word count you believe), but still. It's 82 single-spaced pages, with a few page breaks that may one day be chapter breaks. I haven't read it - I mean, I wrote it, and I've read snatches of it to go back and check details that I put in earlier, but I haven't read it from end-to-end yet. And I don't plan to anytime soon. Everything I've read about editing suggests that you should put it down for a while and come back to it when it can be fresh again, so that's my plan. I imagine it will grow quite a bit, since I did a lot of telling rather than showing, and I'm sure there will be further elaborations. There's also a sub-plot I came up with near the end that I'll need to work in earlier in the editing phase, so I have high hopes that it will actually turn out to be novel-length by the time it's all said and done. And, hopefully, publishable. But those chickens, they are not yet hatched.

Of course, it's about karate. But it's also about hauntings and priests and psychotic cowboys.

I think this is the longest work I've ever done. As I recall, my undergraduate thesis was around 100 pages, but it was also in Courier New, which is a typeface that takes up more space than Times New Roman. It's definitely up in the top two, if nothing else.